WoWWiki states..."Aggro is understood to be the condition of a particular mob attacking a particular character", others use it as an abbreviation for "aggressiveness". I like to think of it as "aggravation", and I've got plenty of that...

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Kiting, I think?

As I learn to improve my understanding of the Hunter class, and all the wonderful abilities we have, one topic I've read about but not really approached is kiting.

At its most basic, my understanding is that you use your various crowd control capabilities plus your own movement to keep an opponent at range, while still delivering some damage.

Appears to be useful for staying alive, and even winning, in PvP.

And in PvE, it seems to be useful for keeping an opponent mob occupied when its immune to freezer traps or just resists your freezer trap.

At its finest art form, I've heard kiting described with various types of running away from your enemy and then executing jump shots where you leap and spin in mid air, firing an instant shot while in the air, then landing back in your original direction and keep running away.

I tried doing that a couple times over the past few months, and I just don't get it. Perhaps I'll come back to that when I can, but for now, not pretty.

One time, when I was relatively new to Hellfire Peninsula, I was mounted and aggro'd some mobs, and kept running with them on my tail, until I came to a little outpost, where the NPC guards then jumped on the guys that were chasing me. Some player standing there observing said "nice kite" to me after the battle was done. I thought to myself "that's kiting? i didnt do any jump shotting or what not? i'll take the compliment, but i doubt that was actual kiting."

Then there's last night. In western Nagrand, there's some demons and such with a quest to grind 2 of this kind, 5 of that kind, and 8 of another kind. You get to take a joy ride on a Netherdrake and he does a fly-over to show you who you'll be fighting. The 2 demons are elites, roughly my level. I group up with a guy to try to take him down. I pull one elite demon, and we're fighting, my pet has aggro, bestial wrath is on and she looks pretty in red, and mend pet's going strong.

Mage I'm with grabs aggro from my pet, and gets 2 shotted. Me and my pet hang in there, popping my two attack power trinkets, but mend pet just isnt fast enough. Ruby takes a dive with the bad guy at about 25% health left. I think real quick "feign death? bahhhh! let me give this a shot. worst case, we call it a wipe".

Knowing that I have no chance of running directly away and jumpshotting, because any time I've practiced that I land completely disoriented and facing in any of 360 possible directions.

So I drop a freezer trap and walk backwards and bandage myself to full health, and let Arcane shot cooldown. Trap thaws with me at just about max range. Fire arcane shot and walk backwards. Fire concussive shot and keep walking backwards. When Arcane is ready, wham. When trap is ready, I dropped frost trap (in retrospect, perhaps freezer would have been better, but I was excited and not thinking clearly), when concussive was ready fire that.

I just kept walking backwards, repeating the frost/concussive/arcane whenever any of them was ready.

With less than 100 health remaining and out of mana, having covered about a quarter of Nagrand's north-south distance, he died.

So does that count as kiting? I think that pre-2.3 patch, the dead zone would have made this impossible because a couple of my concussive shots were with him pretty darn close by, but whatever. I was alive (barely) and he wasn't, and the XP was in the bank.

I too am a bit lazy to learn jump-kitting, and I confess not having done many kites as well!

What I often do, for such a hard mob, is, when pet is low on HP:- Concussive shot the mob;- Recall pet;- Depending on mob distance/pet health, freeze the mob;- Backout and give time for pet to fully heal and w8 for trap CD;- Sick pet in and redo all the above when needed.

Intimidation also helps a bit to give the pet a few seconds of mend pet with no incoming damage.

@someoneI never thought of recalling pet and freezing the mob to allow for 20 seconds or so of "safe" mend pet time. I'll definitely keep that one in my back pocket, but I'm sure I'll forget in the heat of the moment, so please be sure to remind me next time I post about letting my pet die in a perhaps avoidable situation.

There are alot of different ways to kite. With a hunter, if u havent really got down the jump shot thing (u will though, just practise. And u could try the 90/90 instead of the full 360 jump shot)

But for starters u can also run sideways, u will be doing like a giant circle but it lets u run and shot without having to jump shot.

Then there is the very nice version with the frost trap :) Basically u run sideways around ur frost trap and keep the mob sloging in it trying to catch u, need to time concussive when effect wears off though :)

Also frost trap and WC kiting by running through the mob are effective if they dont have stuns or such.

Ohh I love kiting when it works, especially in pvp -imagine how frustrated they must be behind their keyboard :)

Ohh one last thing, u being a BM. If u decide to kite, turn off growl! Pet will do damage and u will be able to use intimidation as a slowing tool.